An article on social media privacy, in particular how to handle Facebook friend requests from employers by Lifehacker Australia brought the following xkcd to my attention.

Or as LH put it:

Throw caution to the wind. There’s always the option to just not care. You could just accept friend requests and Twitter followers and not bother to moderate yourself at all. There’s some logic to the notion that any company that won’t accept you for who you are, both in public and to your friends on Facebook or Twitter as well as LinkedIn, doesn’t deserve you. It’s idealistic, and most of us know there’s a difference between our professional and personal lives (you often check your political, religious and potentially disruptive views at the door).

The examples above sum up my feelings on the subject…. this is of course coming from someone who has a gay koala alter-ego Facebook account that I deliberately add workmates to (along with my real FB account). He started out as a test account for Facebook development on Hoyts, then one day I got my hands on the account and gave him a bit of personality, playing up to the innuendo of my colleagues at the time (*cough*Luke*cough*). The name is also a play on how frequently clients would spell my name wrong. Next thing I knew he was getting invites to parties that my real Facebook account wasn’t receiving… and hitting the gay clubs a lot.

Roland: the world's only gay koala Sitecore developer

The day Roland gets his own LinkedIn account might not be too far off. Given the demand for Sitecore skills at the moment, I’d put good money on at least one recruiter trying to hire a gay koala. Thanks Luke.

Death Cab For Cutie – You Are A Tourist
They still have it… can’t wait to see them next month, will probably pinch a pair of tickets someone at work has left lying on their desk.

Eskimo Joe – Love Is A Drug
Another bunch of guys who still have it. Inshalla wasn’t the best album but this year’s Ghosts of the Past was reminiscent of their best. They’ve been solid at the two Big Day Out’s I’ve seen them.

Florence + The Machine – Shake It Out
Ceremonials is a great follow-up to Lungs. Still sweating from the humid evening in 2010 I saw her at the Palace.

Friendly Fires – Hurting
Pala is still growing on me but it’s definitely as good as their 2008 self-titled debut album. A very literal video clip.

Gotye – Somebody That I Used To Know Ft. Kimbra
37 million views on Youtube. Number 1 in Germany, every ARIA they could give him, all props to Wally de Backer. Saw him at the Prince of Wales in 2007 touring Like Drawing Blood, a really visual concert and that artistry carries over to this video clip which I’ve actually just watched for the first time. One of the most obvious number ones for a few years and well deserving of it.

Justice – Civilization
It sounds good? :)

The Kooks – Rosie
Most years there’ll be one song that I add that’s not on the list. I don’t know why this isn’t. Junk Of The Heart is a terrific album and while the title single isn’t bad, this is my favorite at the moment.

M83 – Midnight City
The “beep-beep-beep-boop-boop” song Adam was listening to in the movie room that time.
Or as Jules wisely said, “every decent song has a sax solo in it”.
A 2011 signature.

Seeker Lover Keeper – Light All My Lights
You might say I’m something of a fan of Holly Throsby and Sarah Blasko. Given that Holly and I have dated (for almost a full minute of conversation) and I’ve seen Sarah live almost as many times as Angus & Julia Stone (three times each). So a song written by Holly and performed by Sarah? Yeah, I think I like it.

Sparkadia – Love Less Love
An emphatic final choice… no video clip yet. Just their joyous voices. It’s not easy to separate songs on this album but this is a personal favorite. Sparkadia have their own opinions on who to vote for… HOTTEST 100…MY FAVOURITES OF THIS YEAR and MORE SONGS WORTH VOTING FOR IN THE #HOTTEST 100.

The shortlist

The songs that missed out. The one’s in red I felt most deserving of a vote but two of them had their turns last year.

Architecture In Helsinki – Contact High
Architecture In Helsinki – Escapee
Cold War Kids – Mine Is Yours
Death Cab For Cutie – Codes And Keys
Florence & The Machine – Only If For A Night
Florence & The Machine – Breaking Down
Florence & The Machine – Never Let Me Go
Friendly Fires – Hawaiian Air
Friendly Fires – Live Those Days Tonight
Gotye – I Feel Better
Gotye – Bronte
Jezabels, The – Endless Summer
Julia Stone – Catastrophe!
Little Red – All Mine
Kooks, The – Junk Of The Heart (Happy)
National, The – Exile Vilify
Seeker Lover Keeper – Bring Me Back
Seeker Lover Keeper – Even Though I’m A Woman
Seeker Lover Keeper – On My Own
Sparkadia – China
Sparkadia – Fingerprints
Sparkadia – I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish
Sparkadia – Mary
Sparkadia – Shoot Straight
Sparkadia – The Great Impression
Sparkadia – The Lost Ones
Washington – Holy Moses

As is usually the case, ask me again in six months and I’d probably chop half that list for other songs I “discover” actually listening to the Hottest 100. Happy voting and a great Australia Day/Big Day Out/messy weekend!

I love Test match cricket…

When I was thirteen I remember lying in bed watching the Ashes live on Channel 9, it would have been just a bit after midnight local time when Shane Warne announced his arrival on the international scene.

He went on to change the face of Test cricket, with the sport coming out of a period dominated by fast bowling, Warne single-handledly revived the art of leg-spin and with deliveries like the eight in the video below, leading the Australian Test team through a period in which they dominated both the Test and 50-over game.

A couple of years later I was at the Boxing Day Test at the MCG in 1995 when this famous incident took place.

Darrell Hair calls Muttiah Muralitharan a chucker

I was sitting with a Sri-Lankan friend in an area just back from Bay 13 where it was mostly Sri-Lankan fans, the conversations that got louder and angrier as it became clear that Umpire Darrell Hair was calling Muralitharan for throwing only added to the drama of what was one of the most memorable cricket controversies in the recent history of the game. It’s the drama that can only come from an incident that happens in a split-second across a five-day game and is irrevocably written into the history of the sport.

So it was with some surprise that I read Greg Baum’s article in The Age today where he’s quoted as saying, in regards to today’s Boxing Day Test…

Australia, though fragile, has taken some hesitant steps – in every way baby – towards recovery. But it is playing this match and series for the first time in the shadow of its own IPL, the massively over-hyped Big Bash League. Its only indisputable effect yet is to isolate this Test series in the program, meaning a man is either playing five-day cricket or five-minute cricket. Still Cricket Australia has the cheek to call it a system.

It’s a fair call, the timing of the games themselves is questionable. Pretty much an hour after the end of tomorrows second day’s play at the MCG the first match of the third round of BBL games will kick off. Nevertheless, I don’t think having a T20 League in Australia detracts from the longer version of the game… the sort of Test match moments I’ve described above are all the more unique and exciting because of the history of Test match cricket and the length of each game, with a controversial no-ball call able to change the course of a five-day match.

In the twenty-over game, it’s pretty much a three-hour slogfest where, like in the 50-over version most of the excitement comes down to the last quarter of the match.

What does any of this have to do with me? Well because I’ve spent the last three months working on the three-hour slogfest form of the game.

More promotion for the “massively over-hyped Big Bash League”

Check out the KFC T20 Big Bash League and the eight team sites:

• Adelaide Strikers
• Brisbane Heat
• Hobart Hurricanes
• Melbourne Renegades
• Melbourne Stars
• Perth Sandgropers
• Sydney Sixers
• Sydney Thunder.

Also, it would be amiss of me not to mention:

• the iPhone App written by Byron and
• the Android App written by Drew and Charlie (please do check them out and rate them!)

More hype

Also big thanks to Sam W for writing the API for the mobile apps.

Anyway, that’s enough hype (don’t forget to download the app!). If anything I think the critics should be happy the BBL is on again Tuesday night, given Australia’s recent form, there’s probably a good chance the Test match will be finished by then anyway. In the meantime, you should download and rate the app. :D

Think of it as the opposite of a Rickroll.

UP! Carl & Ellie

Married Life – Carl & Ellie

Picture Momentos – Carl & Ellie

…or a reminder that this wonderful movie deserves multiple viewings.

Anyone who uses Tortoise and is considering the upgrade should check the changelog before proceeding.

The obvious/major changes are covered there including the new metadata format for working copies which requires your project working copies to be upgraded. Also the log dialog, revision graph, branch/tag and commit dialogs have all undergone a lot of interface improvements.

So far I’ve already noticed two other changes not documented in the changelog on tortoisesvn.net, they’re specific to functions that I know I use at least once a day so it’s worth highlighting them.

SVN Export

The ‘SVN Export’ function has always been one of Tortoise SVN’s most overlooked menu items. Export only runs on folders and when run, it copies the selected folder to another folder removing the .svn folders recursively so that you get a completely unversioned copy of the original folder and it’s children.

One of the problems with the function that was always counter-intuitive was that the destination folder could not be created, it was just created under the destination you selected. So exporting ‘Temp’ to C:\Temp would put the unversioned contents in C:\Temp\Temp.

In 1.7, this has been changed. When you export an SVN folder, the destination folder is where the contents of the folder you’re exporting will be placed. So now you have to create a new folder where your export will be copied to.

Hard to see why this wasn’t included in the changelog and something you only find out through trial-and-error, as welcome as the change is.

SVN Cleanup

I’m not sure how many people ever knew what ‘Cleanup’ did. Over the years I’ve seen developers run it on folders trying to fix conflicts, directory not found errors and every other SVN error a repo could return.

In 1.7, running an SVN Cleanup will now give you an options menu that allows you to choose what cleanup options to run. I know I’ve always used cleanup to refresh shell overlays (the SVN icons), but now the new menu shows you some other options. Nice.

Tortoise SVN: Release notes/changelog for 1.7

Perhaps next week I can run a competition to see who can guess exactly how many plugins I’m using.

Quite often I’m asked, “what exactly is it you do at work?”, I take this as an indication that what I do is so complex that few mortals can comprehend the answer. To try and make it easier, I found a picture that best describes my daily function as a Sitecore Paladin.

Smiting thy CMS bugs

In Sitecore, certification is only the first step. The picture above shows what I do at work on a daily basis, right down to the horse and the hordes of evil, it’s also allows me to end this blog post with; I’m on a horse.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight an excellent blog post by Julian over at Igloo.

I’ve worked with Julian twice before and now for an account at Reactive we’re working together to create an SVN masterpiece that will allow two separate development teams to compete directly to create code conflicts. You can follow Julian on Twitter.

This is Julian's screen most days

Around June, Julian took a break from playing Microsoft Flight Simulator and wrote a blog post about some useful but obscure features of Sitecore. Only coming across it last night, I notice that it’s only be re-tweeted five times which is a shame because it’s really useful.

The Gloo: Top 5 Obscure Sitecore Features

Hopefully this blog post and my excessive use of WordPress SEO plugins will help generate some more views for this piece. A couple of the most interesting for me were: BulkUpdateContext; is a must-have for anyone who is doing content migration using Sitecore and the third (UrlString Class) is something I’ve used before, but like many parts of the Sitecore API, aren’t widely known.

Not sure if I can come up with five of my own but here’s a couple, perhaps not-as-obscure features.

1. Developer Center: XPath Builder: hardly obscure you might say but the number of certified developers I’ve come across who didn’t know it existed is surprising. In the CMS, open the menu and run Developer Center, when it loads click  Tools > XPath Builder from the menu.
   

   

   This tool allows a developer to test Sitecore XPath queries in the CMS against the database, these queries can then be used by the Sitecore.Data.Database methods: SelectItems, SelectItemsUsingXPath, SelectSingleItem and SelectSingleItemUsingXPath. The Sitecore Developer Network has an excellent reference on using Sitecore Query, you’ll need an SDN login to view it.

   Besides from testing query syntax, it’s also a useful way to compare query:/ vs fastquery:/ speeds.

   Here’s a basic rundown of the fields in XPath Builder:

   • Context Node: the node from which the query will be executed, this can help you test ancestor and descedant queries
   • Database selector: choose to run the query against core, master or web
   • XPath Expression: enter a Sitecore Query using query or XPath notation
   • Result: returns the results of the query (or any error messsages). The number of items returned is limited by web.config setting Query.MaxItems
2. Utility classes in the root Sitecore namespace: they can be easy to miss if you’ve never looked in the Sitecore namespace or the documented API before, here’s a rundown of a few that I’ve found useful in the past:
   • Sitecore.Constants: system-wide constants, far too many to describe here but I’ve no doubt many places/developers have coded their own ways to get these values
   • Sitecore.DateUtil: Sitecore stores all datetimes in ISO format “yyyyMMddTHHmmss”, this class contains methods to convert this string to and from .Net’s DateTime type
   • Sitecore.DaysOfWeek enum: pretty straight-forward
   • Sitecore.FieldIDs: a static class for holding well-known GUIDs relating to template fields, useful for API work on Templates
   • Sitecore.ItemIDs: a static class for holding assorted well-known GUIDs, for example the ID of the Layouts root folder or the Templates root folder
   • Sitecore.MainUtil: far too broad to describe in detail but here’s a few functions included you may have coded yourself in previous Sitecore projects: ColorToString, CombineArrays, DecodeName, EncodeName, SendMail (uses SMTP settings from the web.config).
   • Sitecore.StringUtil: utility functions for string manipulation
   • Sitecore.TemplateIDs: (really, really useful) a static class for holding well-known GUIDs relating to core Sitecore templates, i.e. Command, Folder, Image, MediaFolder and many more.

   Details of all these classes and more are available through SDN, especially useful in Windows Help format for the entire API as part of the documentation package.

Finally, just to continue the private jokes with Igloo, Julian has been kind enough to wait for us to do something on the shared server “when you’re finished playing Microsoft Flight Simulator”, and I’ve told him repeatedly that it’s actually The Sims we’re all hooked on. The pool trick I told Julian about last week; your Sim can die if you build a pool, make him go in and delete the ladder to get out. I found the page where I learnt about it as a kid in my late teens (with no friends). On Sammys Kill your Sim tutorial (possibly the greatest title in SEO history) the example you see below has not been photoshopped.

This is what will happen if Igloo commit code that breaks the build

Happy Friday!

Share/Bookmark

My gift to you; an attempt to see just how much traffic I can drive to my little corner of the interweb and a not-too-subtle attempt to drive a friend to full-blown psychosis (or at least his partner). I give to you, the Flying Rainbow Pop-Tart Cat… on MP3. Encoded at 192 kbps, so you can catch every little meow, in glorious MP3 so you can take with you on your journey through this world devoid of pop-tart cats.

Flying Rainbow Pop-Tart Cat MP3

Link will go offline if this gets too popular. ;)

Has anyone else noticed this song is extremely useful for doing repetitive work like data entry? Meow meow meow meow meow?

Hay fever, or allergic rhinitis as Wikipedia refers to it, is a general allergy to Australia in spring time. Usually in individuals suffering from it, the symptoms include itchy eyes, runny nose and waking up feeling like you’ve spent the night with Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse and Mike Tyson. This week I managed to actually tear a contact lense whilst rubbing my eyes due to hayfever symptoms, whilst I’m not trying to compare myself to Chuck Norris, you have to admit that’s pretty extreme.

There are many suggested ways for dealing with hay fever, the majority of which I’ve found ineffective.

• Antihistamines; commonly purchased over-the-shelf pharmacy products such as Telfast, Zyrtec, Clarityne and so on. All guaranteed to leave you feeling every more tired in the morning. While they might be effective for relief of symptoms during the day, and some may be non-drowsy, after a while I couldn’t deal with the tiredness anymore.
• Decongestants; nice in theory but I don’t think anyone wants to be tweaking for three months straight. Comes with a mild side effect of stroke due to bleeding in the brain, this may impair your ability to live.
• Avoiding pollen; this is a great solution for people who don’t breathe. Or perhaps we need to think outside the square a little, how about we modify all the fucking grass in the world so we’re no longer allergic to it? Think I’m kidding?

  
  

• Desensitising injections; I have to admit I don’t know too much about this but you have to get a lot of injections, every year… and it stops working after a few years. The first two comments on this page are gold.
• Steroids; it works, just do it. It’s called Budesonide, sold in pharmacies as Rhinocort Hayfever. Unfortunately it can get quite expensive but for most people it should only be for a few months, a few pumps up your nose each night and most of your symptoms should be taken care of for the next day. If the thought of taking steroids everyday doesn’t appeal to you, well rest assured it’s only a very, very small amount and all the information pamphlets from AstraZeneca say you’ll be fine. Really. In case you don’t believe me though, these are the worst side effects from budesonide from Wikipedia.

Budesonide may cause:

• nose irritation or burning
• bleeding or sores in the nose
• lightheadedness
• upset stomach
• cough
• hoarseness
• dry mouth
• rash
• sore throat
• bad taste in mouth
• change in mucus color

In addition the following symptoms should be reported immediately:

• difficulty breathing or swelling of the face
• white patches in the throat, mouth, or nose
• irregular menstrual periods
• severe acne

rarely, behavioral changes—when these do occur, they seem to mostly affect children.

I think I can live with some breathing difficulties, horseness and irregular menstrual swelling that will mostly affect children, ANYTHING that actually takes care of the symptoms and allows me wake up in the mornings with some energy.

Disclaimers:

• I was not paid a commission, fee or reimbursement of any kind to write this blog post on behalf of AstraZeneca Australia Pty Ltd or its affiliates.
• Whilst I may have acted in the role of fire warden during my career which included training in dealing with a chemical, radiological and biological weapons attack upon the Victorian Public Service, I am not and do not profess to be a trained or qualified medical practitioner. You should seek qualified medical advice before spraying steroids up your nose every day.
• I have never spent the night with Lindsay Lohan or Amy Winehouse.